Work – life imbalance: Informal care and paid employment in the UK

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, informal carers look after relatives or friends who need extra support because of age, physical or learning disability, or illness. The burden of informal care work falls on women, who often care for longer hours and durations than men. This paper considers the impact that caring responsibilities have on women's employment. The research is based on a dedicated questionnaire and in-depth interviews with informal caregivers. The results suggest that carers' employment is affected by the duration of a caring episode, financial considerations, the needs of the person they care for, carers' beliefs about the compatibility of informal care and paid work, and employers' willingness to accommodate carers' needs. Overall, the research confirms that informal carers continue to face difficulties when they try to combine employment and care in spite of recent policy initiatives designed to help them.

Keywords:

• Caregiving
• labor supply
• unpaid work
• JEL Codes: D13, J14, J17

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the European Social Fund. Material from the British Household Panel Survey was made available through the Office of National Statistics and the ESRC Data Archive. We are very grateful to the carer support groups and the carers themselves who participated in this research. Among the groups who helped us were Directions Carers Support Group – Wigan; Liverpool and South Sefton Alzheimer's Society; Lonsdale District Carers; Preston Carers Information Centre; Princess Royal Trust for Carers – Salford Carers Centre and; Trafford Carers Centre. We are also grateful to Susan Charles, participants at the 2005 International Association For Feminist Economics conference in Washington DC, and four anonymous reviewers for Feminist Economics for their comments and suggestions in relation to this work.

Notes

In the US the percentage of the population that provides assistance to someone appears to be higher than in the UK; 16 percent of the US population have been estimated to provide care for adults aged 50 or over (Rheba E. Vetter and Susan Myllykangas 2006 citing data from the Family Caregiver Alliance).

National Statistics Online (2006(a)).

National Statistics Online (2006(a)).

The Women's Budget Group is an independent organization promoting gender equality in the UK through economic policy.

This point was drawn to our attention by an anonymous referee.

Fiona Carmichael and Susan Charles 1998, 2003a, 2003b; Sandra Hutton 1999; Linda Pickard, Raphael Wittenberg, Adelina Comas-Herrera, Bleddyn Davies, and Robin Darton 2000; Heitmueller and Inglis 2007; Lázaro et al. 2004.

More formally, the value attributed to caregiving (Nancy Folbre 1995 and 2004) will shift the household production function outwards, and therefore some people will allocate more hours to home production. Not everyone will respond in this way, since the opportunity costs of giving up an hour of employment will be too high for some higher earners. This is assuming that there is complete flexibility over hours of work and no negotiation over who in the household undertakes care or for how long.

Using the terminology of segmented labor-market theory, people are more willing to undertake care when they are either unemployed or employed in secondary labor markets characterized by low pay, part-time and insecure contracts, fewer promotion opportunities, and less union representation. Since female participation rates are lower than those of men, and more women are employed in the secondary sector, this argument might also explain, in part, why more women are involved in informal care.

This necessarily limited the number of questions that we were able to ask.

In both samples, women were also overrepresented in comparison with carers in general possibly because there were not many carers over 65 among those who responded to the questionnaire and in the BHPS sample women over 60 and men over 65 were excluded.

In England and Wales, students take anywhere between five and ten subjects at GCSE; if passed this would be considered equivalent to a US high school diploma (British Council 2007).

Of the sample, 12.9 per cent cared for between 50 and 99 hours per week while over a third of the sample, 39.4 percent, said that they cared for 100 or more hours a week. In terms of the duration of care, 30.3 percent of the sample had been caring for less than five years, 23.1 percent had cared for between five and nine years, and 46.6 percent had been caring for more than ten years. There was no statistically significant correlation between gender and either hours of caring or the duration of caring.

Among this group twenty carers were no longer working because they had retired, and nine carers were still working but in the voluntary sector.

Twenty-six were in part-time employment, six were working in the voluntary sector, thirty-nine were no longer employed, and sixteen had retired (two people had been working part-time, six people were not working prior to caring, and two people did not respond to the question relating to prior employment but were in full-time employment when they completed the questionnaire. Five people selected the category “other” in response to the question relating to current employment, and three people did not answer the question).

For example, one of the carers we interviewed said that the person she cared for moved in with her specifically because his or her care needs increased.

In particular, since the sample is not representative, significance levels have little meaning.

The other broad themes were the impact of caring on other areas of life such as relationships and health and the support received by carers (Greg Anderson, Fiona Carmichael, Gemma Connell, Clair Hulme, and Sally Sheppard 2005). However, these themes did not relate directly to the employment of carers and are not discussed here.

Median gross weekly pay in the UK in 2005 was £440.1 for men and £319.9 for women (National Statistics Online 2006(b)).